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SaPeer and ReverseSaPeer: teaching requirements elicitation interviews with role-playing and role reversal

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Abstract

Among the variety of the available requirements elicitation techniques, interviews are the most commonly used. Performing effective interviews is challenging, especially for students and novice analysts, since interviews’ success depends largely on soft skills and experience. Despite their diffusion and their challenging nature, when it comes to requirements engineering education and training (REET), limited resources and few well-founded pedagogical approaches are available to allow students to acquire and improve their skills as interviewers. To overcome this limitation, this paper presents two pedagogical approaches, namely SaPeer and ReverseSaPeer. SaPeer uses role-playing, peer review and self-assessment to enable students to experience first-hand the difficulties related to the interviewing process, reflect on their mistakes, and improve their interview skills by practice and analysis. ReverseSaPeer builds on the first approach and includes a role reversal activity in which participants play the role of a customer interviewed by a competent interviewer. We evaluate the effectiveness of SaPeer through a controlled quasi-experiment, which shows that the proposed approach significantly reduces the amount of mistakes made by the participants and that it is perceived as useful and easy by the participants. ReverseSaPeer and the impact of role reversal are analyzed through a thematic analysis of the participant’s reflections. The analysis shows that not only the students perceive the analysis as beneficial, but also that they have emotional involvement in learning. This work contributes to the body of knowledge of REET with two methods, quantitative and qualitative evaluated, respectively. Furthermore, we share the pedagogical material used, to enable other educators to apply and possibly tailor the approach.

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Notes

  1. The design is analogous to a randomized trial, but within a sample that could not be selected considering the entire student population. The design could also be regarded as an experiment in case study settings [53].

  2. We distinguish between SaPeer treatment (i.e., steps 1 to 6) and SaPeer approach, which is the general pedagogical approach in Sect. 3.

  3. The complete description of the case studies (Product Description First Interview and Product Description Second Interview, respectively) can be found in our shared repository [30].

  4. We could not apply the T test, as the samples for each mistake did not pass the Shapiro–Wilk’s test of normality in most of the cases.

  5. We could not apply the unpaired T test, as the samples for each mistake did not pass the Shapiro–Wilk’s test of normality in most of the cases.

  6. For those mistakes in which the practice-only treatment is clearly more effective (white bars in Fig. 6), we performed the same type of test, but to verify whether the effectiveness of SaPeer is significantly lower than the practice-only treatment. Results were not significant.

  7. The students’ reflection are made available in our repository [30].

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation under grant CCF-1718377.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ISTI-CNR: Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell’Informazione “A. Faedo”, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Area della Ricerca di Pisa, Via Giuseppe Moruzzi, 1, 56127, Pisa, PI, Italy

    Alessio Ferrari

  2. Department of Software Engineering and Game Development, Kennesaw State University, Building J, Office 375, 1100 South Marietta Pkwy, Marietta, GA, 30060, USA

    Paola Spoletini

  3. School of Info Technology, Deakin University Burwood Campus/221, Burwood Hwy, Burwood, VIC, 3125, Australia

    Muneera Bano

  4. Faculty of Engineering and IT, University of Technology Sydney (UTS), PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW, 2007, Australia

    Didar Zowghi

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  1. Alessio Ferrari
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  2. Paola Spoletini
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  4. Didar Zowghi
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Correspondence to Paola Spoletini.

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Ferrari, A., Spoletini, P., Bano, M. et al. SaPeer and ReverseSaPeer: teaching requirements elicitation interviews with role-playing and role reversal. Requirements Eng 25, 417–438 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-020-00334-0

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